Up in the Old Hotel

"Joseph Mitchell is by far the best-known person I am recommending here. He is generally regarded as the New Yorker writers’ New Yorker writer. He’s just a genius and the weird thing is that you can’t really work out how he does it. If you look at his prose, it’s so clean and simple that it seems that anyone could do it. But there’s a cumulative effect that is immensely affecting. What he did for 30 to 40 years was to write about all the people on the margins of society in New York. So instead of writing about bankers and financiers and store owners, he would write about tramps and saloon keepers and the guys who ran the dredges out in the river, and people who led 50-year campaigns to stop everyone in New York from swearing. He did this in such a humane way, it’s just wonderful. He doesn’t treat these people as freaks or weirdos in any way, he treats them as the most human of human beings. Even though they’ve all been dead for 50 or 60 years, it’s like you’re listening to them talk. “Most of the stories I’ve done I’ve considered to be fascinating, but they’re just too marginal for me to be a gigantically successful author, sadly.” Mitchell’s greatest gift was his ability to listen well. He wrote down these huge slabs of conversation, which sometimes would go on for pages and pages, and which give you the most vivid impression of these people, as genuine human beings. He just had a genius for picking the most interesting and amazing people, as well. One of his most famous stories, for example, which opens one of his books, is called “McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon”. It’s the story of a saloon down near Union Square, in downtown Manhattan, which over a period of 90 years had four owners, and each was more conservative than the last. So right up to the 1940s you’d go into it and it would be lit by gas rather than electricity. There would be no cash register and all the inhabitants would be 90-year-old Irish guys who just went there because they had nowhere else to go during the day. They were living off a tiny pension, and would be allowed to sit there nursing one mug of ale all day long. It’s just this weird, unchanging look back into just after the Civil War, which is when the place was set up, the foibles of the successive owners, and the way they ran their bar. It’s treated in such a wonderful warm way, you just want to go and have a beer there, essentially. Yes, because this is the history most people knew. New York, of all cities, is a huge melting pot of nationalities and striving. Most people think of it as this place where you have this great piece of good luck that transforms your life. You work hard and you live the American dream. But for 90% of the people that went through it, that didn’t really happen. They ended up scuffling around the margins, making a living of some sort for themselves. Those are the people Mitchell is writing about. He’s writing about everyman, everybody. Most people who write about New York are interested in success – the history of Wall Street bankers or the guy who set up the Macy’s [department store chain]. You get the impression that New York is the town of success. It’s not. It’s the town of losers. It’s full of people who can’t quite make it. And yet they retain something of themselves. They are not subjects of pity. That’s the incredible thing about Mitchell’s writing, you actually quite envy them in some cases, because they are living life on their own terms."

"Joseph Mitchell is one of my heroes. He was one of the writers responsible for making the reputation of The New Yorker magazine in the late 1930s and early 40s. He was a reporter who specialised in writing profiles of people in New York, often quite eccentric people – a woman with a beard, a child prodigy – such as an incredible piece called The Mohawks in High Steel about the Mohawks [a Native American people] who don’t seem to struggle with vertigo, and who work along the girders at the top of skyscrapers. He was particularly interested in the waters around New York. In a way he was their laureate. He wrote about the oystermen and the clam fishermen, the Fulton Fish Market [in the Bronx] and the trawlermen, the culture around shellfish and fin fish, the seafood coming in from the bays of Maine and Long Island and so on. They’re incredibly vivid and moving stories, and often they feel closer to short stories than newspaper or magazine articles. They have an amplitude – there seems to be a hinterland or a space around them, for the imagination to fly in. Often his strategy is to build up portraits and impressions through quite short, declarative sentences, like stones in a cairn. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Sometimes he brings in the first person, as in the essay that gave the collection its title, “Up in the Old Hotel”. It starts in a restaurant on the harbour, Sloppy Louis’, which is at the bottom of a derelict hotel. Mitchell talks to Louis, the Italian proprietor, and initially it’s a portrait. But then Louis tells him about a lift that goes up into the upper storeys of the building, that he’s never used even though he’s owned the restaurant for years. Mitchell and Louis go up in this lift together, to the first floor and then the second, and Mitchell describes it as a coffin. There are deserted rooms in the hotel, full of dust and cobwebs and ghosts, and the story suddenly has this strangeness. It’s verging on the mythic dimension – they’re making a journey into the afterlife, they’re going into death, into otherworldly spaces. But Mitchell is most famous for two essays that were collected in the book Joe Gould ’ s Secret . They are both portraits of this man Joe Gould, a hobo who tramped around Manhattan claiming he could speak different seagull languages and was working on a great work called The Oral History of Mankind . In the first essay, Gould is a loveable eccentric, full of colour, funny, a bit loopy. But in the second essay, written about 20 years later in 1965, there’s a completely different tone – darker, rather sinister and macabre, slightly frightening. Joe Gould is no longer a loveable eccentric. And it runs into the story of Mitchell’s own life. The story goes that after he wrote the second essay, Mitchell carried on going into his office for 30 years until he died, but he never published another article. As though he recognised something of himself in Joe Gould, the man who was working on this comprehensive history of mankind, a work that may not have existed at all. There are so many ways of revealing yourself as a writer – your personality, your sensibility. You don’t just blurt it out. You don’t say: My name’s Joseph Mitchell, my name’s William Fiennes, and I’m such and such a person. You reveal yourself in your curiosity, in where it takes you, in what details you choose to foreground. As Fellini said, “All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.” Mitchell’s collected essays are a self-portrait, even though he hardly ever says anything about himself. Most of his pages are taken up with observations about his subjects, or just the subjects talking and talking. And yet still we have a sense of a man – like Primo Levi – in love with the world, in love with his fellow man, and passionately interested in other ways of life, in other experiences. At the same time you get a glimpse of somebody who’s susceptible to melancholy, who’s drawn to graveyards and the gloomy side of things. Those two energies co-exist – a rapture at being alive, and a recognition of how difficult it might be."